Pat Buchanan – The GOP’s Obsession With Israel and Iran

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Folks, turn on your radio when I’m not on.  You will be drummed over the noggin incessantly with “our biggest ally in the region (Israel)” or the evil and despicable Iran.  They threatened to wipe Israel off the map, they threatened to do this, blah, blah, blah.  As Buchanan points out, why are you guys so obsessed with this?  What is the defense of a state that’s not even a state?  What is it?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Buchanan writing at The American Conservative magazine, among other places, under the headline of “What Hagel’s Show Trial Means.”  By the by, it now seems more than likely that Chuck Hagel will be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense.  Buchanan makes the conclusion, I think the only conclusion you can make from what we’ve heard and seen out of the Grand Old Party over the course of the last month over this Hagel nomination.

[reading]

If last week’s hearing for Chuck Hagel raised questions about his capacity to be secretary of defense, the show trial conducted by his inquisitors on the tribunal raised questions about the GOP.

Is the Republican Party, as currently constituted, even capable of conducting a foreign policy befitting a world power? Or has it learned nothing and forgotten nothing since George W. Bush went home and the nation rejected John McCain for Barack Obama?

Consider the great foreign issues on the front burner today.

Will the Japan-China clash over islets in the South China Sea, now involving warplanes and warships circling each other, lead to a shooting war that could, because of our security treaty with Japan, drag in the United States?

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Mike:  No one is even talking about this.  Andrew, have you heard anyone talking about Japan and China?

AG:  Not particularly, no.

Mike:  Have you read anyone writing about it in the Washington Post?  You read it every day.  Have you seen any editorials about what’s going on over there?

AG:  There was one in the New York Times.  I didn’t really delve into it.

Mike:  Was that yesterday?  Did you send it to me.

AG:  I didn’t send it to you because I hadn’t heard anything else about it.

Mike:  I think I saw this when I was reading another editorial.  This is big stuff.  We are embroiled in the — our tentacles, ladies and gentlemen, spread all over the planet.  You should know this.  [mocking] “Mike, that’s happening in China.  What business is it of ours?  You’re right, what business is it of ours?  Well, because we have a treaty that’s still in place.  Kevin Gutzman pointed this out yesterday when I asked him about Rand Paul’s speech and about foreign policy.  Why haven’t we renegotiated or said we don’t need certain treaties any longer?  It’s been 80 years since that last war ended.

Since we haven’t done that, and you know why, because we’ve just been sitting around going, [mocking] “Oh, boy, somebody is going to screw up and we’ll get to fight in another war.”  We love war.  As Americans, we love us some war.  Because of the treaty with the Japanese over the end of World War II, we would basically be dragged into this.  We also have some manner of treaty with the South Koreans, which is why we still have soldiers there.  Everyone looking at the Middle East as the next place for the war, you may be looking in the wrong place.  You may be looking at the wrong longitude line.  You may have to go 3,000 miles east.  That’s what Buchanan is pointing out, but it gets even worse than that.

[reading]

Is Iraq, where we lost 4,600 soldiers and 35,000 wounded in a misbegotten war to strip that country of WMD it did not have, about to disintegrate into civil, sectarian and ethnic war? After Bashar Assad falls, will Syria fall to Islamists—or fall apart?

Is Egypt’s military chief correct when he said that the violent eruptions after President Mohammed Morsi’s attempted seizure of dictatorial power could imperil the state itself?

Should the presence of al-Qaida in Mali cause the United States to deepen its military involvement in sub-Saharan Africa? [Mike: Then he gets into all the other countries that we could have problems in.]

Yet, according to Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, who reviewed the transcript of Hagel’s eight hours of testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, there were more mentions of Israel, 178, than of Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Palestine and Palestinians, North Korea, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, China, NATO, Libya, Bahrain, Somalia, al-Qaida, Mali, Jordan, Turkey, Japan and South Korea combined.

In the runup to the Hagel hearings, North Korea tested an intercontinental rocket and indicated a third nuclear bomb test may be imminent. Dictator Kim Jong Un said the “target” of these tests is that “sworn enemy of the Korean people,” the U.S.A.

Yet North Korea was mentioned only 11 times in Hagel’s day-long testimony, while Iran was mentioned 170 times.

But Iran has no missile that can reach the United States, has never tested a nuclear device or bomb, has no nuclear weapons program, according to the unanimous verdict of our 16 intelligence agencies, has never enriched uranium to weapons grade, and has all of its nuclear facilities under constant U.N. surveillance and inspection.

Far from threatening America with nuclear fire like North Korea’s 20-something dictator, the Ayatollah Khamenei has declared a fatwa against Iran’s ever possessing atomic weapons.

This is no brief for a Tehran regime that is no friend of this country. But to suggest Iran cannot be contained as the nuclear-armed Soviet Union of Stalin and China of Mao were contained is absurd.

[end reading]

Mike:  Folks, turn on your radio when I’m not on.  You will be drummed over the noggin incessantly with “our biggest ally in the region (Israel)” or the evil and despicable Iran.  They threatened to wipe Israel off the map, they threatened to do this, blah, blah, blah.  As Buchanan points out, why are you guys so obsessed with this?  What is the defense of a state that’s not even a state?  What is it?

[reading]

Query: What is behind this Republican preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with Israel and its nemesis Iran, to the near exclusion of other threats and dangers faced by our country all over a world that is a good bit larger than one small corner of the Middle East? Has Sheldon Adelson replaced Henry Kissinger as the eminence grise of the GOP?

Sen. Lindsey Graham implied it was an outrage to suggest any senator may have been intimidated by an Israeli lobby that has on its wall the scalps of two chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: J.W. Fulbright and Charles Percy.

Who is Lindsey kidding?

Did Bibi Netanyahu, after dissing the U.S. president in the Oval Office, receive those 29 standing ovations at a joint session of Congress, thereby breaking Stalin’s all-time record before the Supreme Soviet, because Bibi gave one helluva speech?

In this city, the Israeli lobby is regarded as right up there with the National Rifle Association as a crowd that rewards its friends and punishes its enemies, with this exception: Far more congressmen and senators are willing to stand up to the NRA than to defy AIPAC.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. Where is the vision that Republicans had in the time of Reagan?

[end reading]

Mike:  You think Buchanan is onto something?

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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